Winners

Felicia McCarthy is a feminist, a poet, a scholar, literary zine curator, and creative facilitator with a special interest in empowering women. She is a daughter, sister, aunt, mother and grandmother. While raising four children aged nine to twelve, she won a competitive place in Trinity College Dublin’s Honors English Language and Literature degree. This four year programme earned her both a BA and an MA. Through university, Felicia continued to work, starting up an alternative book shop for TCD’s Student Union, and in her final year, she worked as a founding member of The Finbar Cullen Co-op. McCarthy then won a place at University College Dublin’s Women’s Studies Master’s programme with a thesis on Eavan Boland, Ireland’s pre-eminent Irish woman poet. McCarthy’s poetry, essays, and editorials are available in many print and online literary zines in the UK, USA, Ireland and Mexico. She lives in Dublin.

Judges Comments:

My sincere thanks to all who entered this competition; with so many collections of high quality, judging has been a labour of many hours, but never laborious. It has been a privilege to be entrusted with such a range of deeply moving and powerful collections, evidencing profound commitment and talent. Subjects ranged widely: politics, war, inhumanity and injustice, history, trauma, the environment, sex and sexual identity, art and artistry; the list goes on. I can only express my respect to all in the face of these, so deeply felt, so powerfully expressed. With such talent before me, I struggled to produce a shortlist of only ten, and wanted so much to give more than three the final accolade. In my comments I have tried to share some impression of those qualities that moved me in particular and unique ways.

Signs – Lucy Ingrams

In this collection every line springs with life and power of imagery. We are immersed in a world of transformations. In the opening poem signs may be direction pointers or informative statements, as we are led breathless into the natural world, re-imagined, with taught syntax and pauses that capture earth’s constant wonder and unexpectedness, its eternal uncertainty and reinvention, pointed by the repetition What if . Here are laid out the choices that face us when confronted by wonder, and how we respond, What if you do, if you didn’t- These are the decisions that will change us, how we regard our environment, and the creative life that seeks to link the self to our world through symbols. (Signs?) So the opening poem raises its question about the directions we choose as we navigate wonder, and leads us into this remarkable collection that unerringly sustains power, linguistic originality, and intensity, even into vulnerability:

a rabbit’s listening
presses back
pushes the heart’s sheath

The potency of this poet’s artistry is exquisite: so highly crafted, the contexts deliver rhythm even in the spaces and silences that are used so adroitly as an essential and organic part of form.

There is so much celebration of nature, that coming to Sentence, a deeply personal and heart rending piece, it is profoundly moving to be allowed into the emotions in a different way. Beginning with the etymology of the Greek for sentence the poet crafts a series around the image of an arrow passing through a narrow slit. The theme of the power of language in a moment of revelation and unexpected clarity is subtly and strikingly delivered. This is a moment of recovered identity, as when Ulysses reveals himself, firing his arrow through the slots in the axeheads. In this poem it is an “opportunity” of momentary contact, all the more devastating as the sentence uttered so unexpectedly by the poet’s mother, is so knowing, so brief, so full of love and self knowledge. The wound inflicted by such an arrow does not heal.

We return to the theme of uncertainty in the title poem, where indications of feeling are longed for, in the knowledge that truths must be faced, in the deliberate delay of the opening of a significant letter. Throughout this collection this poet dwells movingly on the possibilities of life’s other directions, and the signs that may lead or mislead us to or from them. The ache of love, whether it may come to fruition, in So will there be apples? displays the power of youthful passion through the imagery of nature, the signs of overwhelming desire:

the bird houses
trip with alarm calls

and warnings of friends fearing conflagration, and the girl’s lonely steps through the wood – carefully – All this, as so often with these poems, leaves us beset by the doubts and turmoil of emotion, but so acutely crafted and disciplined in the telling.

In these poems we find their spaces and silences, in their heartbeat, expressive of other worlds of possibility, different selves, other outcomes. The tensile syntax and constant creativity of every phrase spring into life and resonance:

In the dream your hands were empty – full of your touch. If you were here, I could
put mine out and you would take them-

Throughout the collection the line breaks, spaces, pauses, are of major significance in the way natural rhythms of speech shift and disappear, in a world of yearning, while we are led with assurance and adroitness into their power and effect, leaving us haunted by loaded silences. Such sophistication is the mark of a totally accomplished poet attuned to a mature imagination, completely confident in their craft.

Nature’s infinite possibilities in My selves in a wood is another kind of signage, where the image of the tree’s grain in its flecks marks the other selves, waiting to flame out

spring’s lick –
its blistering quick- flame fed
from an ember in the heartwood-

Because this poet deals in possibilities, she is never afraid to leave endings open, full of wonder, on which we continue to dwell.

I kept returning to this collection, drawn by its power and freshness. The energy of its language. its diversity and constant inventiveness, fill us with wonder, and we are enthralled, discovering new effects on every reading. Time and again the poems in this collection ring out with an originality that makes us see the world anew, and a vivacity that, for me, made it a winner.

the archive is all in present tense – Elizabeth Hoover

In this startling imaginative feat we enter a world of strangeness that is familiar but otherly. We experience memory and imagination as enacted in the present through the labyrinth of historical, personal, familial, national research and recollection. Part aquarium, where we swim or memories swim before us, the central symbol, at times almost primeval, captures the disorientating effects of our own or others’ memories; also part taxidermy collection and workshop, figures and memories are held in distorted or tortured poses.

The poet’s visits are framed by cards that are part accession slips, part research, part request for information, and each directs into unexpected classifications. Peopled by ghostly figures who suddenly become ordinary, the narrator feels an outsider, emphasised by the language of the archive: formal, disciplined, even suppressed; as in memory, and history, in the plethora of detail and experience, we feel something remains remote, that something is being kept from us. So each card leads us down increasingly strange and unexpected avenues, often into worlds of sexuality.

The imaginative concept is brilliant and addresses the nature of how we are compelled to experience the past, and how we seek answers, about our own and others’ identities, within society’s expectations, and the struggle to be true to ourselves. Family dynamics play a key part, with the coercion of siblings and troubling historical relatives played out against sexual identity. The recurrence of certain phrases in the research looms out in a disturbing mystery of family myth.

The narrator feels an outsider, in what seems at times a setting where one can become easily lost.

All of this is not to overlook the sustained elegance of the writing, as we move section by section through family history, personal struggle, in a symbolic environment that conjures our efforts to know ourselves, who we are, how we are made to feel we do or do not fit in; how we come to terms with the weight of history as it bears down upon us, relived in the mind, in the present, its pain unhealed.

The originality of its concept, the exact placement of memory within a language both guarded and revealing, are captivating. In our search for meaning we may have no control over the caprices, the torments, the mystery of memory, but this collection portrays with beautifully poised accuracy the struggle to assert the will and the drive towards self discovery as inspirational, with the archive of language itself to help us, through the agency of poetry: as conversation with ourselves, our histories, our memories, as part of the universal struggle to understand our identity and place in the world. As such the archive can be an overwhelming labyrinthine experience. This collection navigates its complexities towards self recognition with candour, wry humour, and honesty.

The opening poem lists some of the identities of the archive: oracle, music box, dentist chair, and a place of wanton cruelty. This sets up a complex tone upon which the collection elaborates. The whirl of memory is evoked brilliantly where the researcher is constantly distracted by other thoughts, emotional or sexual.

Through the archive, from poem to poem, we are constantly unsettled, failing to arrive where we thought, as in the taxidermy collection. In its potent symbolism we encounter the sorrowful vestiges of dead creatures, held in a kind of limbo, that suddenly raise questions about family history, disturbing and inescapable.

Throughout the collection the technique is assured and accomplished, suddenly presenting a pressing memory or thought. This is immensely effective against the background of natural landscapes, the settings against which memory plays out. The image of the archive’s papers as falling snow demonstrates this poet’s ability to draw out a complexity with great clarity. This captivating image contains an inherent conflict: snow, ephemeral, unsustainable, while the letters and papers are hard copy of lives, filed away, but, like snow, incapable of being grasped or fully understood.

We shift between the personal and the universal, natural and human: stories half told, implied, gleaned. The final poems find the narrator herself transformed, placed in the archive, aware of nature’s fragility in a series of images, yearning and retrospective, that face with courage the final memory, that of our own fate. And as we experience this journey of research, of self discovery, of facing the past, with every page we too are transformed.

My Country is the Whole World – Felicia McCarthy

There is complexity and ambivalence in this collection’s title, drawing on Virginia Woolf’s phrase, and the poet brilliantly elaborates on this through each section: the world may be seen as one country where we all must live and interact; or as a portal to a view of wider experience, where we owe everything to our ancestors and ourselves. The “whole world” is everything we have, our world of possibilities, past, present, future, as well as the fragile rock on which we stand.

The opening section of this moving and highly crafted collection deals with responsibilities: to the environment, to history, our ancestors, to moral behaviour in our transactions and sexual behaviour, and to the children of the next generation. In the tender sequence, Mother we feel the poet’s sense of responsibility to the tenderness of memory.

The formality of the verse gives great dignity to this collection: it is at once, tender, raw, and very beautiful writing, unafraid to be open to the moment, the enlightening glimpse of memory, the ache of gratitude to the environment and to the past.

The almost unearthly Under the Eaves begins with a mystery that slowly unfolds, capturing the vision of children as they fall asleep: the ultimate state of innocence described as a rite of passage into later life. Poignantly, this poem is followed by The Ancestors, with its heart rending final line, “their desire to return, to make things right.”

The section that deals with relationships and conflict is another part of the title’s “whole world”: a place of suffering, difficulty, abuse. Triple Zero demonstrates a technique at which this poet excels: the ability to take a common phrase and create a context that redeems it with a new vigour and unexpected meaning. We see this at its most powerful in the courageous poem The Ferryman is a Woman, where death is faced with optimism, in lines that restore and transform a common phrase with inspirational force.

Throughout this collection, subtly, and with keen awareness of the potential and responsibilities of poetry, craft and discipline are constantly in evidence, exacting the poignancy of relationships, and gratitude for the gift of life and poetry. The consummate artistry of this poet is consistent throughout the “whole world” that is explored and transformed by the poetic imagination. For the writer the “whole world” is also writing itself, and we see this in the valedictory poem, a tender tribute to her mother, expressing the yearning that poetry tries to assuage, and, ironically as it does so, amplifying the sense of loss.

The skill and imaginative power of poetry sometimes lies in the ability to see much in humble things. Writing about her T-Shirt, this is homage not just to a garment, but to the life lived. Treasured for its memories, its faded quality, the final lines are poignant and beautiful, as always in this collection, without strain or pretence reaching out to the universal.

Always appreciative of the power of locations and the debt to environment, The Gathering of the Boats provides a further example of the impact of the poet’s ability to deliver the perfectly balanced simple phrase in an ending that moves us with its sense of gratitude. The debt owed to poetry itself is keenly felt in A Photo of my Grandmother the Cyclops: as blindness increased “The lines she learned by heart stayed to the end of days”. The mystique and resonance of poetry resound throughout this collection, its language and phrasing totally attuned to a dignified formality.

That is not to say the collection is without humour. Mindfulness and Melville teases us with what for some may be a contentious view; but then read the notes to this poem.

This is writing of resilience and optimism: in Finally the “whole world” of experience is compressed into the haunting image of a shell rendered beautiful by abrasion. This poet reaches into our tenderness and uncertainties, and grants precious solace. In her description of Dublin the poet uses the word beguiled, and, for me, this word sums up the experience of reading this collection.

These collections made deep impressions on me, as did others I must mention.

Landsickness by Leigh Lucas deals with trauma with immense dignity, candour, and discipline, in a series of highly crafted poems that deal with loss, with a sense of remoteness that captures the ache of grief. The stark courage of confronting the profound feelings of anger, pain, unfulfilled love and opportunity, make this an intense collection where its craft elevates the personal into an uncompromising but inspirational examination of the universal experience of facing grief. In its candour, and determined confrontation of difficult truths, it is beautiful writing.

Other collections over which I agonised when it came to the final three were A Party Business, by Roger Elkin, and Silver Samovar by Jenny McRobert. The former is a tour de force of historical research and scholarship, transformed by writing of visceral power. Jenny McRobert’s collection is tender and sophisticated. Last year she was first in the Welsh Poetry Competition. It was a delight to read more of her work.

– Mick Evans